Diagnosing the Body Politic

Abstract

Complaining about the civic health of the United States has become a virtual industry in itself. Scholars and journalists spend an enormous amount of time describing the symptoms of political and social decline. They claim that Americans vote less, hate politics and government more, and have less sense of community than ever before. Public discourse has descended to a level that allows sleaze maven Jerry Springer (a former politician of course) and his ilk to flourish, leaving little room for serious public discussion. Meanwhile, the rich get richer and more powerful while the poor get poorer and cannot do anything about it. If Americans of different political stripes can agree on anything today, it is that public life is getting worse. In The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, sociologist Michael Schudson argues that this diagnosis is rash. We need to take the patient's full history before we can safely conclude that things truly are getting worse. Doing so, he insists, places contemporary American public life in a clearer context, one that suggests it is not manifestly in decline. Schudson claims that most present day civic jeremiads rely on an outdated model of citizenship. They assume that a responsible citizen is one who is consistently engaged with all the issues that face society and is capable of addressing these concerns in a rational, competent fashion. They also assume that at some point in our past, this form of prevailed. The Good Citizen persuasively shows that this ideal world never existed and that this model of is just one of several that have prevailed over the course of American history. Schudson's argument is daring, persuasive, and refreshing. He draws a vast range of scholarship into a 300-page account of the shifting standards of citizenship. As with any synthesis, there is room to snipe where complex debates have to be condensed into a few pages. And historians may chafe at the structure of the argument, which necessarily underplays continuities because it emphasizes change. But Schudson makes a compelling case. Definitions of good citizenship are indeed historically contingent. The Good